C. J. Cherryh Archives - Martin's Booklog

Foreigner – C. J. Cherryh

Published on May 25, 20113 Comments

Cover of Foreigner

Foreigner
C. J. Cherryh
423 pages
published in 1994

Foreigner is the fifth book in my Year of Reading Women project. It is the first novel in one of C. J. Cherryh’s more popular series, yet until now I had never read any of them. She is such a prolific writer that it’s easy to miss a series or two. She also has such a wide range, writing anything from fantasy to space opera, that not everything she writes appeals to every one of her fans. The number of people I’ve known who hated her breakthrough novel Downbelow Station for example…

Yet, once you’ve read a few of her novels, you discover that there is one narrative trick all her stories have in common, no matter what the setting or the plot is. What she likes to do is to take her protagonists out of their comfort zone, get them at their most vulnerable and then put the pressure on. Every one of her novels I’ve read has the same structure. The protagonist is a young man (rarely a young woman) put in a position of responsibility but without power. Usually he’s an outsider in an alien culture, cut off from his own people, in the middle of some sort of political crisis he barely understands let alone can influence. She then let’s this crisis heats up, makes sure her hero gets little to eat and less sleep and is as far removed from the centre of the crisis as possible, yet still has a vital role to play in resolving it, even if he not necessarily knows it. To make sure the reader is as much in the dark as the hero, she usually makes sure they’re only looking at the story through his eyes.

The Pride of Chanur – C. J. Cherryh (reread)

Published on November 24, 2010

Cover of The Pride of Chanur

The Pride of Chanur
C. J. Cherryh
224 pages
published in 1981

I’ve read and reviewed The Pride of Chanur before, way back in 2001. That’s only three sentences long though, so high time for a reread and a proper review, especially as I’m trying to read more women sf writers this year, having discovered how unbalanced my reading was. Rereading old favourites like this one seemed a good way to start. Even if it did make me dream of kissing a Kif at Kefh.

The Pride of Chanur is a trade ship run by Hani –a race of bipedal intelligent lions– of the Chanur house/clan, captained by Pyanfar Chanur. She’s doing the rounds of her ship, currently docked at Meetpoint, the big interspecies trading station run by the stsho, when something speeds past her into the ship. At first thinking it some kind of animal escaped from another ship, it turns out to be sapient, but “naked-hided, blunth-toothed and blunt-fingered” unlike any species she knows, something that after careful questioning calls itself human and turns out to have escaped Kif custody, the Kif being a particularly nasty race of black robed, grey skinned, long snouted pirates and thiefs. She refuses to hand it –him– over to them and the result is she and her ship have to flee Meetpoint, one step ahead of the murderous Kif, who in the process blow up and murder another Hani ship…

Gate of Ivrel – C. J. Cherryh

Published on September 16, 2007

Cover of Gate of Ivrel

Gate of Ivrel
C. J. Cherryh
191 pages
published in 1976

Cherryh has always been a bit hit or miss with me; some books I’ve devoured in one evening, others have taken me weeks to read, while some I’ve tried but never finished or never tried at all because they didn’t seem interesting enough. On the whole I seem to like her science fiction the most, while her fantasy novels have largely disappointed. It helps that she’s so frikking prolific, having written something like a zillion novels since the mid-seventies. There’s always a new series or novel to try if the last one didn’t satisfy. In this case, it’s Gate of Ivrel, actually Cherryh’s first novel, which I had had in my to read pile for years and years and finally decided to try. After having read a few monsters of books, the chance of reading a book with less than 200 pages was quite welcome. It didn’t disappoint either: this was a fast, exciting read, fairly polished for a first novel, not as good as some of Cherryh’s later novels of course, but good enough in its own right.

The story is either science fiction or fantasy, depending on your views, as the central premise is purely science fictional, — a network of teleportation gates that transport you through time and space left behind by a vanished alien race which needs to be destroyed by a team of Union scientists — but the setting is pure fantasy: a backward planet with a semi-medieval tech level, split in warring tribes and afraid of sorcery and witches. Not to mention that the population is human, but not descended from
Earth.